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SquadronROE posted:I've got a question that might have come up before, but I don't think I've run across it. What are some of the strangest tank designs to come out of the last hundred years? Like, have there been any tanks with twin barrels on the same turret? The nazis win again. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landkreuzer_P._1000_Ratte  I mean, if you're looking for sheer  factor, that is hard to beat. 
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Aug 21, 2015 20:05
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Alchenar posted:Nobody really doubted the soldiers on each side in the ACW, it's more that the US army had no conception of how to manage armies of a hundred thousand strong prior to the war (I don't think there was even an established staff college until afterwards) and it shows in a lot of the early battles. To be pedantic: There wasn't a staff college of any sort for the Army until 1903 in the US, with the reforms of Elihu Root. (The Naval War College was established in 1884.)
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Aug 21, 2015 20:10
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Ensign Expendable posted:I don't think that two guns in one turret counts as strangest. Those are amazing, and I had no idea they existed. What about "Production" tanks, or tanks that actually saw combat.
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Aug 21, 2015 20:10
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Spacewolf posted:To be pedantic: There wasn't a staff college of any sort for the Army until 1903 in the US, with the reforms of Elihu Root. (The Naval War College was established in 1884.) Meanwhile the French had had one since 1750 and the British and Prussians since 1800.
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Aug 21, 2015 22:26
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Alchenar posted:Meanwhile the French had had one since 1750 and the British and Prussians since 1800. I'm glad all those extra years of studying paid off in 1871 and 1914!
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Aug 21, 2015 22:47
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So if you graduate west point in The 1840s , fight in Mexican war at the age of 20, then two decades go by and you get a commission in the civil war at the age of 40ish...have you kept up with military theory? Technical advances? I understand how much this would differ from person to person but what are your options: pretty much to attend lectures and read publications? And as a follow up, were there notable journals or some other publishing house for something like this, either in the USA or Britain, maybe something I could try to find now? Or was it all just tied to the culture or membership of the war college or west point?
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Aug 21, 2015 23:00
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Don't forget, the lessons European countries took from the Siege of Port Arthur, which was that heavily fortified positions could be taken under direct assault, but with high causalities and a few months work on sapping. This wasn't valid in WW1, one reason which being the ease of reinforcement and counterattack, not possible in the case in Port Arthur.
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Aug 21, 2015 23:02
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SeanBeansShako posted:All the goons contributing majorly in this thread huge props to you all. I eagerly look forward to every update about the Taiping Rebellion, silly German soldier antics, Poland stuff and now the Triple Alliance War. CoolCab posted:Yeah longtime lurker, the WW1 day by day, crazy Christian Chinese rebellion and Hay Gal's stuff in particular has been stunningly excellent but the general level of posting here is fantastic. This is easily one of my favorite threads on the forum. Despite some attempts to create military colleges early in the 1600s, the way you teach children to eventually go to war is to take them to war or house them with some commander. So, some future officers ended up living in Wallenstein's household, or going to the schools he had established for young noblemen on his estates. Their education was overseen by Jesuits, one of the purposes of that order. This could have unforeseen side effects, as when one of them decided he had a vocation to the priesthood:  and that was how the Imperial commander in chief ended up giving orders to probably kidnap a German preteen
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Aug 22, 2015 00:24
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I just cracked open Steam warfare in the Parana (1848), and was greeted with this: Can someone tell me a little bit about congreve rockets (I assume those are congreves), and how they would be used in the mid 19th century? They make a few appearances in the Paraguayan War, but nobody in those books has much to say about them.
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Aug 22, 2015 00:27
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HEY GAL posted:Despite some attempts to create military colleges early in the 1600s, the way you teach children to eventually go to war is to take them to war or house them with some commander. So, some future officers ended up living in Wallenstein's household, or going to the schools he had established for young noblemen on his estates. Their education was overseen by Jesuits, one of the purposes of that order. This could have unforeseen side effects, as when one of them decided he had a vocation to the priesthood: It's interesting because Jesuits have always had more than a passing relationship with the military, going all the way back to St. Ignatius.
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Aug 22, 2015 01:10
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dokmo posted:I just cracked open Steam warfare in the Parana (1848), and was greeted with this: They lit things on fire really good but were as accurate as you'd expect giant metal bottle rockets (with sticks and all) to be. Thus, great for lighting the point ship in a slow-moving (such as against the current in a river) formation on fire, great for reducing flammable fortifications, but not significantly better than existing weapons. also,  :Captain Mercer of G Troop Royal Horse Artillery of the use in this mode by Mercer’s troop during the retreat from Quatre Bras on 17 June 1815: posted:"The rocketeers had placed a little iron triangle in the road with a rocket lying on it. The order to fire is given - port-fire applied - the fidgety missile begins to sputter out sparks and wriggle its tail for a second or so, and then darts forth straight up the chaussée. A gun stands right in its way, between the wheels of which the shell in the head of the rocket bursts, the gunners fall right and left… our rocketeers kept shooting off rockets, none of which ever followed the course of the first; most of them, on arriving about the middle of the ascent, took a vertical direction, whilst some actually turned back upon ourselves - and one of these, following me like a squib until its shell exploded, actually put me in more danger than all the fire of the enemy throughout the day."
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Aug 22, 2015 01:35
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Jack B Nimble posted:So if you graduate west point in The 1840s , fight in Mexican war at the age of 20, then two decades go by and you get a commission in the civil war at the age of 40ish...have you kept up with military theory? Technical advances? I understand how much this would differ from person to person but what are your options: pretty much to attend lectures and read publications? Some fairly notable ACW individuals observed the Crimean War in person.
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Aug 22, 2015 01:54
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Another American Civil War question: How did Southerners explain away the contradiction between "Slaves are well-treated and happy with their lot in life" and "We live in constant fear of a massive slave rebellion"?
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Aug 22, 2015 03:22
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more friedman units posted:Another American Civil War question: Wily northern agitators stirring up slaves to act against their own best interests?
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Aug 22, 2015 03:25
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Ensign Expendable posted:Brilliant Russian madness. As far as I'm aware, the West doesn't really take to the same twin-gun concept in anything like the same way that Russia did, but there are a few goes at it. M6 heavy tank: 76mm and 37mm. An American prototype heavy tank that didn't see production.  MTLS IG14: twin 37mm guns. A one-off tank made by an American company for the Dutch. Saw service in the Dutch East Indies in WW2  VT tank: twin 105mm/120mm guns. I'm not entirely sure what Germany was going for here, but I don't think it worked.  There's also the Stridsvagn 140 project from Sweden, which was to have a 140mm and a 40mm in the same turret, but that didn't get to the prototype phase.
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Aug 22, 2015 03:28
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Jack B Nimble posted:So if you graduate west point in The 1840s , fight in Mexican war at the age of 20, then two decades go by and you get a commission in the civil war at the age of 40ish...have you kept up with military theory? Technical advances? I understand how much this would differ from person to person but what are your options: pretty much to attend lectures and read publications? As far as I know, the non-senior officers mostly spent their time reading and getting plastered.
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Aug 22, 2015 03:42
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more friedman units posted:Another American Civil War question: Quite often 'they are savage brutes kept content by our wise and gentle leadership but left to their own devices' *looks significantly at Haiti* 'well...'
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Aug 22, 2015 04:02
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more friedman units posted:How did Southerners explain away the contradiction between "Slaves are well-treated and happy with their lot in life" and "We live in constant fear of a massive slave rebellion"? Cognitive dissonance. Not being flippant. That's the real answer.
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Aug 22, 2015 04:47
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Notably, one of the few Australian Sentinel tanks they built had the turret modified to house two 25 pdr guns that fired together as a test to see if it could take the recoil generated by the 17 pdr which by then was somewhat of a necessary ability for an ersatz Sherman. Apparently it could.
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Aug 22, 2015 05:15
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What the hell is the point of having more than one gun? What goal was this trying to achieve?
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Aug 22, 2015 05:17
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Throatwarbler posted:What the hell is the point of having more than one gun? What goal was this trying to achieve? More firepower per tank.
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Aug 22, 2015 05:27
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Throatwarbler posted:What the hell is the point of having more than one gun? What goal was this trying to achieve? While one gun is reloading, the other can fire. Presumably you could also use the two guns for different tasks (like using a smaller caliber cannon for light vehicles and infantry while saving the big stuff for tanks and buildings). The M3 Lee/Grant is an unusual case, as the 75mm gun in the hull was actually a stopgap put in place before a new tank could be built that was able to have a 75mm turret gun. In the interim, they just took the M2 medium tank (which has a 37mm turret gun) and shoved a 75mm in the right side of the hull.
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Aug 22, 2015 05:30
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Sticking a machine gun on a tank is the best idea and it ticks me off whenever I see tanks in fiction that just have one big gun and then of course it's just a big lumbering thing that can't really deal with infantry effectively.
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Aug 22, 2015 05:34
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That tends to be more of an RTS thing. And if you make your tanks good against hard and soft targets, then the only way to balance it is to make infantry ridiculously lethal against your tanks, and make them as blind as a bat.
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Aug 22, 2015 05:39
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chitoryu12 posted:While one gun is reloading, the other can fire. Did they have 6 man crews? Who was going to be doing all this poo poo within the confined space of a tank turret? I'm not sure if the limiting factor to the rate that a tank can accurately put down fire is the number of barrels. This just seems like such a strange and impractical idea, like equipping infantry with double barreled rifles or something to improve firepower.
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Aug 22, 2015 05:42
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SlothfulCobra posted:Sticking a machine gun on a tank is the best idea and it ticks me off whenever I see tanks in fiction that just have one big gun and then of course it's just a big lumbering thing that can't really deal with infantry effectively. I feel this is egregious in Company of Heroes where you can have tanks on a hill and enemy shermans just run past you with barely any damage. Close combat I liked a whole lot more, infantry can murder tanks that get too close to you if you have molotovs on you but otherwise murder everything that's right in front of them.
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Aug 22, 2015 05:56
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Throatwarbler posted:Did they have 6 man crews? Who was going to be doing all this poo poo within the confined space of a tank turret? I'm not sure if the limiting factor to the rate that a tank can accurately put down fire is the number of barrels. Autoloaders
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Aug 22, 2015 05:59
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Throatwarbler posted:Did they have 6 man crews? Who was going to be doing all this poo poo within the confined space of a tank turret? I'm not sure if the limiting factor to the rate that a tank can accurately put down fire is the number of barrels. I don't know about the Soviet tanks, but the M6 had one loader and a guy handing him rounds, the 105mm version of the VT tank had two loaders for the two guns and the 120mm version of the VT tank had autoloaders.
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Aug 22, 2015 06:00
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Throatwarbler posted:Did they have 6 man crews? Who was going to be doing all this poo poo within the confined space of a tank turret? I'm not sure if the limiting factor to the rate that a tank can accurately put down fire is the number of barrels. Double barreled rifles, you say?  To be fair the guy that painted this was nuts. Anyway, as mentioned above, the point of two cannons is to engage different kinds of targets, usually. You use the small one when you're shooting at something not worthy of your bigger one. In rare cases where both guns are identical, it's done to improve the rate of fire, but this is only meaningful in situations where you're firing at fortifications, really. This is why the concept never took off.
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Aug 22, 2015 06:06
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HEY GAL posted:Thanks very much, and here's one: I particularly like the line about "also, ignore my wife, she's not up on current events".
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Aug 22, 2015 06:12
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The concept has been vaguely revitalized with modern vehicles that have an autocannon coaxial to their main gun. Like the BMP-3 has a 100mm main gun/missile launcher and a 30mm coaxial autocannon.
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Aug 22, 2015 06:12
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You know what's also crazy? One man turrets. WWII French had a thing for them.
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Aug 22, 2015 06:47
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Throatwarbler posted:Did they have 6 man crews? Who was going to be doing all this poo poo within the confined space of a tank turret? I'm not sure if the limiting factor to the rate that a tank can accurately put down fire is the number of barrels. The M3 Lee did in fact have a 7 man crew, which was a bit excessive to say the least.
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Aug 22, 2015 07:20
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Acebuckeye13 posted:The M3 Lee did in fact have a 7 man crew, which was a bit excessive to say the least. That's because it was an apartment building on tracks.
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Aug 22, 2015 07:22
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SlothfulCobra posted:Does anyone here listen to The Dollop? It's not strictly military, but they do touch upon military things every so often. The last episode was about a surprisingly successful invasion of Canada. By the irish. It's a couple pages old but I took a listen and their lovely Irish accents were hilarious.
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Aug 22, 2015 08:21
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FAUXTON posted:That's because it was an apartment building on tracks. The famous "Coffin for seven brothers"! The Lee was great in Africa though, because that big 75mm HE flinger was exactly what the Brits needed for schwacking Rommel's PAKs and 88s.
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Aug 22, 2015 08:23
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JcDent posted:You know what's also crazy? One man turrets. It would have reduced silhouette a bit, I guess?
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Aug 22, 2015 08:26
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Quinntan posted:As far as I'm aware, the West doesn't really take to the same twin-gun concept in anything like the same way that Russia did, but there are a few goes at it. Yeah, just 'two' guns? Pfft. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/M50_Ontos
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Aug 22, 2015 08:35
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GreyjoyBastard posted:I particularly like the line about "also, ignore my wife, she's not up on current events".
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Aug 22, 2015 09:40
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SquadronROE posted:I've got a question that might have come up before, but I don't think I've run across it. What are some of the strangest tank designs to come out of the last hundred years? Like, have there been any tanks with twin barrels on the same turret? Look dude, we all love C&C Red Alert.
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Aug 22, 2015 09:57
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